4 ms·

I don't know what you mean by "hotshot" exactly, but all of the people who had extensive experience in my high school also knew functional programming and data

I don't know what you mean by "hotshot" exactly, but all of the people who had extensive experience in my high school also knew functional programming and data structures and algorithms. I'm not sure math makes all that much of a difference either because the most experienced people in my class were all doing math-related things (myself a physics minor, my girlfriend a math minor, and my two other friends a math and physics double major, respectively).

_delirium 16y ago
That definitely wasn't the case at my high school. The high-school coders were almost exclusively some mixture of C, C++, Java, PHP, Perl, and maybe bash. There probably were nonzero people who had used Scheme, but I'd be very surprised if it were more than one or two.
- rwmj 16y ago
  And if a few of them tried Scheme, then teach Prolog. Nobody knows that ;-)
  - Hexstream 16y ago
    Failing that, Forth or J ;P
  - Locke1689 16y ago
    Meh. Do you really think learning programming languages is hard? I think with C, C++, Python, Scheme, CL, Haskell, Racket, and ML under my belt it would take me about a day or two to adapt to new syntax and then you'd be back in the same position you started in. I just wouldn't worry so much about experienced students or give them something extra to work on if they wanted it. I started programming when I was 9, meaning I had been messing around with Linux, systems, programming languages, and algorithms for a full 9 years before stepping into my first class freshman year. My professors did the proper thing and used the finals from the freshman year CS courses to propel me to upper level courses in my first quarter. Don't try to work against experience, work with it.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
leon_ 16y ago
It's that "func programming is rocket science"-stigma people nowadays spread. I don't know why they hype functional programming that much (maybe because they could show off the C "hotshots" in their CS 101 course?) but FP is such a basic and simple paradigm that it's not really something to brag about.

_delirium 16y ago

That definitely wasn't the case at my high school. The high-school coders were almost exclusively some mixture of C, C++, Java, PHP, Perl, and maybe bash. There probably were nonzero people who had used Scheme, but I'd be very surprised if it were more than one or two.

rwmj 16y ago
And if a few of them tried Scheme, then teach Prolog. Nobody knows that ;-)
- Hexstream 16y ago
  Failing that, Forth or J ;P
- Locke1689 16y ago
  Meh. Do you really think learning programming languages is hard? I think with C, C++, Python, Scheme, CL, Haskell, Racket, and ML under my belt it would take me about a day or two to adapt to new syntax and then you'd be back in the same position you started in. I just wouldn't worry so much about experienced students or give them something extra to work on if they wanted it. I started programming when I was 9, meaning I had been messing around with Linux, systems, programming languages, and algorithms for a full 9 years before stepping into my first class freshman year. My professors did the proper thing and used the finals from the freshman year CS courses to propel me to upper level courses in my first quarter. Don't try to work against experience, work with it.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

leon_ 16y ago

It's that "func programming is rocket science"-stigma people nowadays spread. I don't know why they hype functional programming that much (maybe because they could show off the C "hotshots" in their CS 101 course?) but FP is such a basic and simple paradigm that it's not really something to brag about.